Category Archives: publishing

The Millionstook note, and I got advance notice of a good review forthcoming in Booklist: “Shapiro (13 rue Thérèse, 2011) has written a deeply dark yet strangely uplifting second novel, about a woman beginning to find herself, discovering her own power and the tools to make use of it.”

Meanwhile I have an excerpt of the book up at Nerve.com if you’d like to get a foretaste. I didn’t know Irina was so into red lipstick (they took their cue from the saucy book cover I’m sure), but I like. Classic and shamelessly sexy.

Lots of stuff in the hopper! I have a story out in the new Zyzzyva and a column about fairy tales coming out on HuffPo on Friday and other stuff I hope gels… The journey begins.

“In the Red has all the elements that make for a down-the-rabbit-hole story: it’s exotic, dangerous, deviant, delicious. But this is also essential reading about sex and identity–how trauma informs first loves and relationships open old wounds. Shapiro understands the balance sheet of power between men and women better than any other writer out there. In the Red deserves a place beside Colette and Anaïs Nin on every woman’s bookshelf.”

I have been remiss in updating this blog, and generally hermitting. It’s been for good reason! The baby is crowning. If I haul a lot of ass, I will have a full draft of In the Red by the end of of July. If I haul less ass, by the end of summer. Pretty sweet, no?

Meanwhile, some neato news while I hermit:

• 13 rue Thérèse is finally coming out in France in August, from Michel Lafon. Here is the link to pre-order from Fnac, which is like the French Barnes & Noble. Squee! Just thinking of a French edition of my book being in their big-ass store in the Forum des Halles right near where I grew up makes me all tingly! Here is the cover, all tiny because I suck at technology:

I am wee.

• Also, whilst googling myself to see whether anyone on the internet has posted that I like to bathe in the blood of Christian babies, I found this lovely review of my story “Commuting” in Zyzzyva, on Ruelle Electrique, an online literary salon. It’s their “unabashed favorite from the issue!” “A rich story” teeming with “grit and beauty!” How does randomly finding something like this make a writer feel? Why, it fills said writer with hearts and butterflies!

13 rue Thérèse is now out in paperback! With a sexy quote from USA Today right on the cover–rowr. In celebration, I am changing the link on the side of this page. If you click on the cover of my book, it will now take you to the amazon page for the paperback rather than the hardback.

13 rue Thérèse also just launched in Poland! Plus the Italian paperback came out and the cover looks totally different. Check it out:

(Sorry I could not find a larger image! My googlefu is weak. Anyway, saucy, no?)

Short story-wise, I have one out now in The Farallon Review. It’s got dogs! And creepy bad things happen! Do creepy bad things happen to the dogs? Only one way to find out: get a copy of the journal…

In the Red-wise, I just passed the 200-page mark earlier this week. I think that’s probably about two thirds of it. So, this week, instead of Sophomore Novel Angst, I have a case of Sophomore Novel YAY, which is way more fun as syndromes go. Sophomore Novel YAY manifests as an early morning trip to a diner to feast on something called The Volcano. The Volcano is composed of: three giant buttermilk pancakes with syrup, two eggs sunny side up on top, and four slices of bacon. Is this a great country or what?

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Thank you, Mr Churchill. I think I just passed the mid-point of In the Red. Phew. I am at another stopping point where restructuring will have to take place. This is pretty much the most inefficient way to write a book EVER. It took me like a year for find a narrative voice–and there’s still no solid structure! Basically I write in fragments until I get to a pausing place, then shuffle everything around to make it as cohesive as possible. Then I keep generating the fragments until the whole thing is balanced all wrong and I can’t go any further, and I have to pause and reshuffle again before I can continue. I feel like Sisyphus. Hold me.

These days I spend a lot of time considering alternate careers. Hey, speaking of alternate careers and Winston Churchill, I think I’m going to chuck this whole novelist thing and open a nautically-themed gay bar called The Traditions of the Royal Navy. Who’s with me? (Although apparently that quote was not actually uttered by Mr Churchill. Drat.)

In better news, I just went over the proofs of my story “Commuting” for Zyzzyva’s Spring issue. It looks coooooooooool! It will be out in April! Brace yourself for the awesome. There will be a sexy, sexy release party at Tosca’s in San Francisco if you feel like coming by. I’ll also have a couple of appearances around the March release of the paperback for 13 rue Thérèse. Check out my events page if you’d like to swing by for any and all of these gatherings… I’m sure you could get a bit of rum at Tosca’s! You’re on your own for sodomy and the lash though, unless of course I get to open my bar.

• 13 rue Thérèse was published as a paperback in the UK this week, complete with a sexy quote from Simon Schama right on the front cover (“a flirty, dirty tease of a novel” ROWR!). Plus a nice review came out in various British papers from Pam Norfolk.

• Remember the gothic dog story I was talking about on this blog sometime ago? It found a home! It will be published in The Farallon Review in February of 2012. Pretty sweet, no?

• This afternoon, I blew some bubbles at my cat and it TOTALLY EXPLODED HER LITTLE WALNUT BRAIN. Her world was thoroughly rocked. She kept sniffing the ground where they popped to try to figure out where they went.

• I have been doing all sorts of awesome research for my novel that I can’t post about on this blog because it’s pretty raunchy. But I thought I’d tease and tantalize you by mentioning what I’m not going to talk about. Yes, my dears, you’re just going to have to wait to read my findings in book form Lord-knows-when…

• I took an awesome vacation in Barcelona with some friends. If you ever make it there, I recommend five things:

Eat lots of ham. The Spanish rock at ham.

Check out all the Gaudi architecture. That guy was the best kind of nut.

Do NOT check out the sex show at the Bagdad Club if you ever want to sleep again.

Bring bug repellent, unless you’re into sporting gigantic mosquito bites that turn into humongous bruises all over your body when they heal. I mean, you might be into it. Like, when people ask what happened to you, you can tell them you got into a bar brawl. Or you could wipe a tear from the side of your eye and say, “I guess I just don’t listen.” Your choice.

Look up when you hear squawks! Barcelona has a very sweet and entertaining population of small green wild parrots.

• My stomach is currently growling. This is indeed a fascinating development. One that will unfortunately require me to sign off and forage for food…

I just heard a cat throw up in the next room, but for now I am going to pretend I didn’t and continue typing… A couple of weeks ago, I was one of five featured authors at a scholarship benefit for the Christamore House in Indianapolis. It was an amazing trip: we raised over a hundred grand and I sold (and signed!) nearly three hundred books. I completely winged a 10 minute speech in front of a crowd of 1000 people–and I happened to be AWESOME. I only found out after that my image was projected to the audience from a GINORMOUS SCREEN above the stage, and I am exceedingly glad I did not know that while doing my thing up there as the self-consciousness of that knowledge would have definitely dampened my gregarious awesomeness. (Seriously, imagine the zits and lines on your face blown up like a bajillion times for an audience big enough that you can’t hold it all at once in your visual field and you will see what I mean.) Anyway, I had a grand time hanging out with the other fabulous authors (Meg Waite Clayton, Michael Koryta, Louis Bayard and Victoria Brown), being shuttled around in a gigantic limousine, cramming hors d’oeuvres in my face at a shameful rate in a room filled with women each wearing jewelry whose cost exceeds my annual income, and generally living someone else’s glamorous life for a couple of days.

I came down rather hard on my return home, as I caught quite an extravagant cold on the plane back, which is only now abating. I’ve extruded a truly stunning amount of coagulated-pea-soup-looking mucus during the interim; I should have saved it all in a massive glass jar and submitted it to the Museum of Modern Art as an “installation.” But, I bet Marina Abramovic already thought of this. (Probably she mixed the mucus with accelerant, drenched her body in it, set herself on fire while chanting L’Internationale, and called the piece “Loins of Judas.”)

Tomorrow I am flying down to Los Angeles for the LA Times Festival of Books, where I will be performing “Loins of Judas.” For now I am off to play a really exciting game called Find The Cat Puke, Hopefully Not By Stepping On It With My Bare Feet.